The Old Bridge Page 12

  Johnson instinctively reined himself in. He looked around. The music was getting louder, and the bar was becoming jam-packed. It was probably time to go. “I can’t give names. It’s sensitive,” he said.

  “Okay, that’s fine,” Katarina said, resting a hand on Johnson’s thigh. “Listen, there is a quieter bar we could go to, just up the road, it would be easier to talk.”

  “Well, I think I’m going to head back now, actually,” Johnson said. He finished his rum and glanced down at Katarina’s hand. She removed it.

  “Okay, whatever. We could just have one drink at the other bar, then you can go,” she said. Her hand brushed against his thigh again, but she didn’t leave it in place this time.

  Johnson’s instincts told him to walk out of the bar right then. She was obviously just trying her luck.

  “No, I really have to go. Sorry.”

  “Okay, well I’m heading to the other bar anyway. I’ll walk out with you.”

  Johnson felt he couldn’t exactly say no to that. They walked out of the bar, and Johnson turned toward his hotel.

  Katarina fell in step with him. “I’m going that way,” she said. She tapped a message to someone on her phone as she walked. “Are you sure you don’t want another drink?”

  Maybe she was just a woman on a night out, looking for some company. But still.

  “I’m sure, but it’s been nice talking—”

  A man wearing a black ski mask suddenly appeared from behind a van, blocking the way, and said something in Bosnian.

  Johnson looked at Katarina. She was backing away from them.

  “What?” Johnson said. He suddenly felt a surge of adrenaline kick through him. Here we go, he thought.

  By then, the man, thick set and muscular, had drawn level with him. The ski mask covered his face apart from his eyes and nose.

  Johnson braced himself, his back to a tall brick wall.

  The man, now silent, stepped toward Johnson and launched a punch hard and low, aimed just below Johnson’s rib cage, with little windup or telegraphing.

  Johnson saw it coming and managed to raise his left forearm sufficiently to deflect it a little, but it still connected with some force. He felt an immediate sharp, stabbing pain around his kidneys.

  It had been a very long time since he had last been involved in a street fight. But like most CIA recruits, he had trained in martial arts and close-quarter combat. Those skills had occasionally come in handy over the years.

  Instinctively he saw the man was slightly off-balance following his punch, so he made a short-armed jab with his right hand, aiming for the man’s nose, but connecting with his cheekbone.

  The thug raised his hands, grabbed Johnson by both shoulders, and shoved him backward into the wall behind him. Johnson’s head crunched against the brickwork. The man pinned him there, one hand on each shoulder, his arms at full stretch, and then head-butted Johnson hard at the base of his forehead, between his eyes, jamming his head back against the wall again.

  “You are trying to poke your nose into our business here in Mostar,” the man said, now speaking in English as he continued to pin Johnson to the wall. “This is a warning to you. You need to leave now. Get out of town, get out of this country, and leave us all alone. It is nothing to do with you. Otherwise you’ll be in the river.”

  Pain seared through the back and front of Johnson’s head. The pungent scent of the man’s aftershave filled Johnson’s nostrils. It was unmistakably the same aftershave he had smelled earlier that day at Omar’s house—this was his helper, Tomislav.

  Johnson managed to get both hands up through the gap between Tomislav’s two forearms. With his left hand he slammed down as hard as he could against the man’s right elbow joint, causing it to bend and rocking Tomislav back on his heels slightly.

  Then Johnson used his right hand to strike as hard as he could with the flat of his palm straight into Tomislav’s nose. The man gave a deep-throated grunt of pain as his head went back.

  At the same time, Johnson jerked to his right. Now Tomislav was completely unbalanced. Johnson used his right hand to shove the man’s head around in a tight semicircle, straight into the brickwork.

  The tables were turned. Johnson had Tomislav, his knees buckled, back against the wall.

  Johnson fully expected Katarina to launch herself at him. But he could see out of the corner of his eye she was walking quickly up the road, away from them.

  He switched his right-hand grip from Tomislav’s face to his neck and managed to bash his head backward against the wall again, then pushed hard to keep him there.

  He shoved the thug one more time against the wall. Tomislav’s knees buckled further.

  Johnson let go. “Don’t try that again, buddy,” he said. Then he ran toward his hotel.

  By the time he got back to Muslibegovic House, he felt slightly dizzy. His head throbbed with a sharp, insistent pain at the back, where it had crunched into the brick wall, and he could feel a large lump at the front where he had been head-butted. He was now feeling drained as the adrenaline receded.

  Johnson reached his room and managed, after two attempts, to get his key into the lock of the door.

  A voice came from behind him. “What the hell’s happened? The back of your head’s a real mess. There’s a ton of blood.”

  It was Jayne, standing in the doorway of her room.

  Johnson turned around and groaned. “Don’t say anything, Jayne. I screwed up.”

  “Oh, you’ve been hit. Your forehead,” Jayne said. “What bastard did that?” She walked across and put one hand on each of his shoulders.

  Johnson shook his head. “It was a setup and, stupidly, I didn’t read it early enough. A guy who works for Omar, name of Tomislav. Don’t worry, I’m okay. I just need some sleep.” He checked his watch. It was half past eleven.

  “Joe, you’ve got blood trickling down the back of your head. It’s all over your shirt. I’m going to clean you up first. Come on.”

  She led him into his room, then into the bathroom. “What happened?”

  “I met a woman in a bar and had a quick chat. But I got a bad vibe and decided to head back here. Then she walks out with me. I was heading toward the hotel when the next thing I know, this guy Tomislav appears from nowhere and lands a couple of punches, telling me he’s giving me a warning. I got him eventually—slammed him against a wall. He’ll be worse off than me.”

  “So Franjo sent his heavies in,” Jayne said.

  “Yes. It’s got to be Franjo and Marco. Tomislav probably knows them or something. I couldn’t see his face, but I recognized his aftershave, it stank.”

  Johnson winced and held the back of his head. “I hadn’t even drunk all that much.”

  Jayne took some tissues from a box in the bathroom, dampened them under the tap, and began dabbing the back of Johnson’s head. “At least it’s stopped bleeding.”

  “Have you got any painkillers?” Jayne asked.

  “Yes, there’s a pack in my bag.”

  “Okay. Hope you feel better in the morning.” She folded her arms. “I guess the lesson is don’t go out drinking late by yourself when you’ve got people on your tail. We were shot at today, Joe! What were you thinking?”

  “You’re right. I should have come straight back here after I’d finished speaking with Ana. I just felt like a beer.”

  After Jayne had gone back to her room, Johnson drank a glass of water, swallowed a couple of painkillers, and sat in bed.

  He checked the emails on his phone. There were two from Ana.

  Hi Joe, it was good to meet you. I would like to see something happen from this investigation you are doing. I hope what I said was useful, though I realize it wasn’t much. I have an address for Aisha in New York. It is 34-12C 38th Street, in Queens. One thing you should ask her about that I forgot to mention when I saw you. I remember her one day being very upset. She said her father was in trouble because of some documents and that it was Franjo’s fault. She never told
me more, but it stuck in my mind. Thanks, Ana.

  The second note from Ana included only an email address for Aisha that she had forgotten to include with the first.

  Johnson forwarded the first one on to Jayne with a note on the top. Looks like a trip to NYC imminently. Then he put his phone down and lay back on his pillow. Within seconds, he had fallen asleep.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Thursday, July 12, 2012

  Mostar

  Johnson woke to find the back of his head stuck to his pillow and the lump at the front still there. But the worst of his headache had receded.

  He gingerly sipped from a bottle of water that Jayne had placed on his bedside table and checked his phone. It was nine o’clock in the morning, and the sunlight streamed into his room.

  Then he remembered the email from Ana the previous evening and sat up straight. Immediately he felt a sharp pain below his ribs, where Tomislav had hit him, and winced heavily.

  “Got to get to New York,” he muttered to himself. He pulled himself slowly out of bed and padded into the bathroom. After using the toilet, he splashed some cold water over his face and examined his reflection.

  “My God,” he said when he saw the large purple patch at the base of his forehead, between his eyes where Tomislav’s head-butt had made contact. The color was starting to descend toward his eye sockets. He touched the bruise cautiously and cringed.

  There was another large purple bruise below his ribs.

  He put a bathrobe on, then walked carefully into the corridor and knocked on Jayne’s door.

  Upon opening it, she immediately suppressed a giggle. “Sorry, Joe, can’t help it.”

  “They’re going to pay for this, you do realize,” Johnson said.

  “Going to be a big bill, then. Plastic surgery doesn’t come cheap.”

  “Ha! Just make me a coffee will you? We need to discuss what we do next.”

  Jayne opened the door fully and let him in. “Yep, I read your email from Ana. I think you’re right. You need to be on the next flight to New York. Hopefully the bruising will go down while you’re en route, otherwise Aisha will get a shock. I can stay here and start thinking about how we try and track down this guy Haris Hasanović, the elusive keeper of all things Izetbegović.”

  Johnson walked in and sat in an armchair near the window while Jayne made coffee.

  He took his phone out to search for a flight. “Let’s see, I can get away this afternoon, Croatia Airlines into Nice, then direct to JFK from there. That’ll do the job.” He finished the booking just as she handed him a steaming mug.

  “There, drink that. Should improve your mood,” Jayne said.

  He took the mug. “Thanks. I was thinking that if I’m going to New York, I could pop up to Portland and see the kids and my sister, but I can’t go looking like this.”

  Johnson reclined in his chair. “Anyway, it completely underlines the fact that Franjo or Marco are desperately trying to block an investigation.”

  Jayne sat on the bed and folded her arms. “We should make sure word gets back to Franjo and Marco that you’re gone, out of the country, as per the threat from that Tomislav guy.”

  “Yes, good point. Maybe Filip can think how we could do that. Perhaps a message via Omar and his thug helper.”

  Jayne eyed him. “Yeah, good idea. Speaking of Filip, he seemed quite down earlier. He’d had an update from police who are apparently making little headway in tracking down Marco for questioning about the Petar murder.”

  Johnson sat up. “They are slow. You’ll just need to keep him focused on our inquiry. I don’t want him going off by himself trying to find Marco.”

  Thursday, July 12, 2012

  Wolf Trap, Virginia

  Robert Watson picked up the plastic water bottle from his desk and hurled it across his private office at the back of his six-bedroom house.

  Then he stood up and kicked his wicker wastepaper basket, which tumbled and flipped across the floor, cannoned into the door, and spilled its contents of old chocolate bar wrappers, paper tissues, and plastic soft drink bottles onto his office carpet.

  “Shit, what the hell is that guy playing at,” he said out loud. He sat back down and blinked as the early morning sunshine caught his eye through the window.

  Watson once again studied the secure email received from his friend Mike at the National Security Agency.

  Robert, I’ve done a check as requested on Joe Johnson. I can confirm email traffic and phone calls to and from him in both Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina over the past week. I can’t read the emails, they’re all encrypted. However, further cross-checks show one email to Johnson that I have been able to read—because it came from Langley, from Vic Walter’s account. See attached copy. I’ve done a remote trawl of VW’s hard drive, but there’s nothing else on there that seems relevant to this or to Johnson.

  Thanks

  Mike

  Watson clicked onto the copy of the email to Johnson from Vic, dated July 10.

  Doc, the guy you need to speak to is Haris Hasanović, who I understand kept the minutes of many informal meetings involving US officials in Sarajevo within Izetbegović’s office. He’s now presumably retired. Last known location Dubrovnik, but we don’t know where exactly. Your job to find out. It’s a starting point. Also, COS in Croatia is Alan Edwards. He’s based in Zagreb but sometimes goes to Split. I’ll send you a text message with his details when I get them. He will help you.

  Vic

  Watson picked up his phone and made an encrypted call to RUNNER’s number. It rang four times and then was answered.

  “Hello?”

  “RUNNER, it’s SILVER. Listen, our problem is bigger than I thought. It’s not just Johnson doing this on his own initiative.”

  There was a pause. “What do you mean, it’s not just Johnson?”

  “It’s bigger than him. He’s under instructions.”

  “From who?”

  “Some other part of the CIA,” Watson said. “I won’t go into exactly which departments, but someone else here has asked Johnson to investigate something related to Haris Hasanović, who, as I’m sure you may be aware, used to keep the meeting minutes inside Izetbegović’s office—including those of meetings with US officials.” He paused for a second. “You realize this is dangerous territory?”

  “Right, but why would someone else inside the CIA be looking to investigate Hasanović?” Boris asked.

  Watson picked up a foam stress ball that he kept on his desk. “Oh, come on. Probably every sensitive document, every decision, every death warrant would have passed under his nose, including anything US-related, from Bill Clinton downward at that time.”

  “We’ve just given this guy Johnson a shot across the bow ourselves,” Boris said. “I arranged for a friend of mine to give him a good kicking. Didn’t quite go as planned, but I hope he got the message. You need to remember I can’t afford for him to get far down the track either, not if he’s a war crimes investigator. What else do you want me to do?”

  Watson considered his options. “I’ll have a think about it, but one thing you need to make sure of: Johnson cannot get his hands on those damn documents you’ve got. I warned you to get rid of them a long time ago; it’s going to backfire badly.”

  Boris frowned. “Get rid of my insurance policy? I definitely won’t. I’m not mentioned in there, and neither is Marco. But there are references that could lead to you. So they’re going to backfire on you, not me. But anyway, they’re secure. There’s no way he can get his hands on them without blowing himself into the Adriatic and halfway to Italy.”

  “As I advised you a long time ago,” Watson said, “I think you should give me the location where you’ve hidden them as a safeguard, you know, in case something happens to you.”

  Boris snorted. “You don’t seriously think I’m going to give you that. Twenty years of asking, and you still haven’t got the message.”

  “You don’t get it,” Watson said. “If this
guy Johnson gets hold of them, I’m finished. And if that happens, I’ll make damn sure I take you down with me.”

  Watson ended the call. “Damn it, damn, damn, damn it!” he muttered. He paced around his office a couple of times, then stood and stared out of the window.

  He sat back down at his desk and rang another secure number, this time for his CIA colleague Alan Edwards.

  “Alan, it’s Robert. Listen, apart from that RUNNER job in Sinj, there’s something else. Sorry, buddy, there’s a lot going on here at the moment. This one is quite urgent.”

  He heard Alan swear under his breath before answering. “Okay, what’s that?”

  “This goes back to ’93 and the weapons supply arrangement we had with Izetbegović and his army,” Watson said. “His office had records of that, a dossier, that we asked him to get rid of, but we don’t think that happened. They sort of disappeared. I know who’s had them, but I don’t know where they are. Anyway, I’ve heard through the grapevine, from one of my moles, that another group at Langley, I think run out of the director’s office, is trying to get their hands on the docs now as well. No idea why, but I will find out. I think, though, that someone’s trying to do the dirty on me. We can’t afford for anyone to get their hands on those papers. There’s very good high-level political reasons why not. Understand?”

  “So you want me to—”

  “Yes, you’ve got to locate them,” Watson said. “I need them. And if you do, there’s a promotion in it for you.”

  “Okay, I’ll give it my best shot. Where do we start?”

  “Here’s what I need you to do. You start in Split. I’m about to send you a secure email with the details and a photograph of the person working for the other Langley group whom you need to track. He may well lead you to the documents. The guy’s name is Joe Johnson.”

  “Do you know much about him?” Edwards asked.

  “Yes, unfortunately.” Watson sent the email to Edwards and then gave him a brief summary of his dealings with Johnson in Pakistan and Afghanistan.